What if the Heathrow Bombers Succeeded?

Niall Ferguson imagines a successful British airline plot and makes some pointed observations in the LA Times (thanks to all who sent this in):

"Five passenger aircraft have blown up in midair and crashed into the Atlantic. The planes — believed to be operated by American Airlines and United Airlines — left this morning from Heathrow Airport, bound for the United States. There are no reported survivors."

Such a calamity would at once have been dubbed "8/27." But the political consequences would have been very different from those that followed 9/11....

An 8/27 would have been diametrically different. From an American vantage point, a successful terrorist plot launched from Heathrow would have been doubly Britain's fault. Its proximate cause would have been a lapse in British security. Its root cause would have been the infiltration of British society by radical Islamism.

As details emerged about the perpetrators, Americans' worst suspicions about Britain would have been confirmed. It has been clear for a while that Britain's Muslim communities are proving fertile recruiting grounds for Islamist extremists, and that it is the disaffected sons and grandsons of Pakistani immigrants who are most susceptible.

Perhaps even more troubling, it has been evident since the arrest of attempted shoe-bomber Richard Reid that ordinary British dropouts can also be lured, via religious conversion, into the terrorist network. Imagine if it had been established that one of the perpetrators of the worst terrorist outrage since 9/11 had been the son of a respected Conservative Party official.

Far from editorializing that "We are all British now," the American media might well have reacted to 8/27 by saying, "The British are all suspects now." The Atlantic would have drastically widened.

Read it all.

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Americans, please don't kid yourselves. The very same thing could have been plotted and carried out by US muslims (and may well be done sooner than one might think).

There are PLENTY of neighborhoods in the US where the exact same things and thinking as in UK go on every day.

Sadly, it's only a matter of time until it does happen in the US, even if the borders were to be hermetically sealed right now. There's already a huge 5th column within our borders.

Do you think the explosions from five passenger aircraft would have been loud enough to wake Mr Blair? Would lawyers take to life boats and paddle out into the Atlantic to make sure any surviving jihadist bombers had legal representation?

The UK must do all in its power to achieve its self-ordained condign Pyrrhic victory of political correctness over common sense. The UK must not succumb to the quaint notion that the government is to govern for the majority.

God save the Queen because her parliament won't.

It will most probably take the repetition of a

Brighton Bombing which sruck directly at the ruling Govt of the day before Blair and his PC/Dhimmi cabinet wake up and stop having Tea parties at No10
with the MCB etc.

A rocket inserted per rectum is a fine reminder of survival instincts if you live scathed or otherwise.
The trouble with Govt these days is that they live cloistered and coseted , as far away from the great unwashed as possible.

Its sad to say this socialist pretence of a govt is more interested in building Casinos, playing pocket billiards with the rich and famous than in serving her Majesties loyal subjects.

Too late, Mr. Ferguson. This is from the TSA's Travel Assistance page on the Web:

'Passengers traveling to the United Kingdom will be subject to more extensive security screening processes, including a physical inspection of baggage at the departure gate.'

Even though is says "to" the UK, we know why, don't we?

I read the whole article “What if the Heathrow Bombers Succeeded?” and from what I read, far from blaming the Muslim community, the sheeple, yes the 60 million sheeple of Britain (or at least 55 million of them) would have blamed it on Blair and our relationship with the US, and they'd be harping on about how our relationships with the US and Israel, and how our effrontery to actually help our allies to take out the terrorists had made us more of a target. The British sheeple can't see beyond the headlines of the BBC, the Guardian, Independent, Daily Mirror and the rest of the lying and scurrilous British press and media which has spent the last five years waging a vicious vendetta against Blair and Bush, and for the last 50 years, Israel. The media here in Britain never inform their readers and listeners that we face a global Jihad with no opt-out clause other than pitiful surrender to the forces of evil. To do so would make Blair and Bush more popular, and that explains why they would rather see our civilization extinguished like the Roman Empire than tell the truth. As a result, few here seems to know that Filipinos are being massacred by Jihadis. They've forgotten about Mumbai, and never seem to have heard about the Jihad being waged in Thailand. They're mentally lazy and have no imagination or grasp of reality whatsoever. They can't be bothered to bone up on Islam and the history of Jihad or read any of the hundreds of blogs, which deal with this subject, and get the answer as to why atrocities like 911, Bali, Beslan, Luxor, Mumbai and many more have taken place in the name of Islam every day for 1,400 years and counting.

They're far more interested in who gets evicted from the Big Brother house than in the Jihad that threatens their very exisatence and the things they take for granted. The whole place reeks of defeatism, which can only lead to total and unmitigated defeat. There's none of the spirit that got us through two World Wars. The reason they want Blair to quit is because their fatuous line of thinking is "If we get or elect another Prime Minister, he will pull our troops out of Iraq and Afghanistan and sever our special relationship with the US, and hey presto, our problems will be solved and we will no longer be a target for Islamists". Based on this fairy tale, they want to hang both our countries out to dry and run up the white flag of surrender to the Jihadis, with all the horrors it will entail for us, and our descendants. A Winston Churchill would be totally out of place in the Britain of today, and had the generation of today been around in 1940 instead of that generation, brought through the school of hard knocks, they would have blamed our own Government for the Blitz rather than Hitler, and trotted out the refrain "Our cities are getting bombed because we declared war on Germany" - that is, if we weren't utterly defeated and conquered by the Nazi war machine before the Blitz even began. Even a Chamberlain would have too much of a backbone for the weak-willed masses which populate Britain today. In short, we are in a very invidious position.